Every social network has its own systems for spreading content virally. There are however common themes throughout the major sites which account for the greatest viral spread of social media applications. Although the technical implementation of talking to each network is very different, this commonality conceptuality allows Contagion Media to offer a single intuitive framework for dealing with these networks; this avoids getting bogged down in the complexities of the exact operation of each network.

This article is going to focus on the four main vehicles methods of viral spread on social networks. We will show visual examples from Facebook, Bebo and MySpace to demonstrate these conceptually common themes of operation

There is a lot of mystery surrounding how applications make it on to the social networks, and how users install those applications. This article is meant to dispel the mystery for non-technical people. It explains a few key points on how an application is published on the major social networks Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. It also describes the process of how a user installs that application on their account.

This article is by no means an exhaustive technical discussion of these processes, as they have a great number of technical intricacies, however it does give the valuable insights necessary to understand the process.